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Reality Crashes the Technocrats' Party

AUSTIN, TEXAS — A new global aristocracy is in the making, and it gathers every year in a city whose favored T-shirt slogan is “Keep Austin Weird.”

Like aristocracies past, it has its own rituals and symbols and practices, and it conceives of itself as uncynically serving the best interests of mankind. Like aristocracies past, it seeks to remake the remainder of humanity in its image. It reaches into the innards of our consciousness to shape what we believe, how we spend our days, how we love and reason and remember.

This emerging aristocracy is, of course, the technocracy — the thousands of men and women who are striving, through the gadgets and services they sell, to change the texture of being human: to change fundamental things about all of our relationships with time, with our brains, with each other.

To spend five days at South by Southwest in Austin — the pre-eminent global gathering for the technocrats — is to observe all this in concentrate. Here they are surrounded by believers; here the Luddites and cynics and late adopters are scarce; here they can lay bare inner thoughts and be frank about their plans.

SXSW, as it is known, had the feeling of a pilgrimage, where devotees of the civil religion of technology mix with what some dubbed “spring break for nerds” — all-night dance parties, ample free food and booze, massages stirred, as it were, with single malts.

The technocrat is worthy of anthropological analysis. He — and this elite is predominantly, though not exclusively, male — favors plaid clothing, sometimes multiple layers of it, that purposely clashes. He likes chunky glasses that distract from his face. His music is the music of mostly white, guitar-strumming, angsty bands — not the throbbing salsa and hip-hop and house and pop that move much of the rest of the world.

When listening to this music, the technocrats dance in their own way. You will seldom see two technocrats dancing together, as the old-fashioned and the young and lusty do elsewhere. Technocrats tend to dance facing forward, solo, eyes on the band, spared of having to overcome physical awkwardness. This is how this crowd renders a dance floor at midnight on a Saturday into that rare space that feels asexual and earnest.

The most striking thing about the technocrats, though, is the nature of their imagination — algorithmic imagination, if you will. Such an imagination conceives of human problems as fundamentally solvable, so long as we have the tools to find the objective right answer. Technocrats tend to ask questions of “how,” not “why.” Their world may be rife with design problems, but it appears all but devoid of moral or philosophical ones.

The moral imagination senses that objective right answers are elusive, and that the act of solving problems often requires taking sides. There may be an algorithm for building better structures in Japan, but there is no algorithm for Libya. There are only choices and disputation and trade-offs: earning the wrath of some to do right by others.

The technocrats are more silent on the latter kind of question. At discussions I attended, they generally repeated their mantra that more technology will refine the world, that it is only a matter of time.

But outside the SXSW bubble, and sometimes within it, forceful questions are starting to be asked about the technocracy and what it wishes for us.

To dip into some recent writings: James Gleick is asking whether information has become the new crack. Evgeny Morozov and Malcolm Gladwell are asking whether it really is the case, as so many casually assume, that more Internet always means more freedom and openness. Nicholas Carr is asking whether we are losing our powers of reading and writing. Scientists around the world are asking what this new oxygen of constant connectedness does to our brains.

A telling moment at SXSW involved the question of crowdsourcing. Lukas Biewald, founder and chief executive of CrowdFlower, was invited to tell his company’s story. He spoke of the wonders of taking a large task, such as verifying the phone numbers of businesses listed in a directory, and farming it out to ordinary people in their homes through the Internet. He suggested that, while coercion was possible in a physical sweatshop, it could not happen online. The transparency of the Internet, he said, makes it near impossible for firms like his to do harm.

Then Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor, spoke. Mr. Zittrain is a fan of the Internet and has built his career in studying it. But in the SXSW bubble, he seemed to feel compelled to be the grown-up talking of risks and threats.

How do we know that crowdsourcing companies pay fairly? On whom in this distributed workforce does liability fall? How do we ensure that children are not exploited? How should we judge Internet Eyes, a British company that pays users to watch CCTV footage and look for crimes? Or the site used to crowdsource the identities of anti-government demonstrators in Iran?

These are moral questions, not algorithmic ones. Amid the dancing and feasting and networking at SXSW, they drizzled like rain on the parade.